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“Losing Patients” (Consegrity)

Consegrity is a faith healing practice that is 100 percent faith and zero percent healing. It was started by someone who should have known better: Georgetown School of Medicine alum Mary Lynch. Her co-founder, Debra Harrison, died from a combination of untreated diabetes and stupidity while receiving consegrity treatments from Lynch. According to Harrison’s family members, Lynch blamed the death not on diabetes but on the family members’ “negative energy.” Despite their pleas, Harrison never sought medical care.

The first consegrity victim was Harrison’s mother, who died a few months before her daughter. The elder Harrison used consegrity to treat extreme body aches and jaundice. The daughter attributed the ailments to unspecified cellular toxins that would disappear once detoxification was complete.

By the time the mother went to the hospital, she had developed an inoperable, grapefruit-sized tumor. In perhaps the all-time ad hoc rationalization, her daughter claimed the diagnosis didn’t reveal the cancer, but caused it. The negative thoughts, she surmised, caused consegrity’s efficiency to collapse, giving birth to the tumor. Lynch died in 2012, presumably from a consegrity overdose.

The field’s literature finds the usual batch of undefined, unprovable, unfalsifiable New Age buzzwords: Awareness, balance, disruption, dynamics, interactive energy fields, paradigm, quantum something or other, and state shifting. Some originality is shown by addressing a “cell’s spiritual trauma,” and we have an Einstein reference for good measure.

The crucial difference between this treatment and the likes of Reiki and crystal healing is that consegrity, used as instructed, will kill you. Many other New Age healing methods promise only to restore one’s harmony or balance an energy field. Consegrity practitioners, however, assure patients they will be cured of ADHD, allergies, asthma, back pain, cancer, chronic fatigue, depression, eating disorders, fibromyalgia, headaches, heart disease, HIV, and learning disabilities. They also note it can improve athletic performance and work on animals. The co-founder also claimed it cured diabetes, though she was disinclined to prove this on herself. It is a dead giveaway of pseudomedicine to make claims this wide-ranging. It can cure everything except gullibility.

Lynch’s defunct website read, “We can bring order to chaos, unity to our mind, body, and spirit, and awaken to a planet reborn through remembering who we really are.” In this case, what you are is dead for taking this as your medical advice.

As to how it works, the description is so drenched in undefined gobbledygook, it’s hard to figure out. But it seems to center on cleaning up negative energy around one’s cells. Or rather, paying someone who has plunked down $2,000 for consegrity training to do it for you. The healer detects negative energy inside the patient’s cells, removes it and transmits it to positive energy, then reenters it into the patient. No explanation is given for how this works, nor has any study been done on its efficacy.

Another pseudomedicine sign is the proponents’ insistence that this is a settled science. One merely needs to clean up an energy field and everything is fixed for good.

For consegrity, the death of both co-founders and one of their mothers proved a huge blow, but not a fatal one. A few practitioners are out there. One site wrote of the technique: “There is no difference in results between a distance session and a local session. The client’s inherent wisdom is guiding the practitioner throughout the session.” So you don’t need to show up and the attendant needn’t do anything. That’ll be $500, please.

Deeper into the site, we learn, “Consegrity can enhance positive emotions and can dissipate negative emotions. Emotional healing through consegrity will improve every facet or your health.” Yep, it’s as simple as mind over matter and melanoma.

Still later, we see that, “The patient may need more sessions to address the source.” Rather odd for someone who has received a panacea. Going on, it reads, “Patience is important to allow for full healing, as you’re addressing cause. It’s a long-term solution.” How long term depends on how much time goes by before you die from an untreated disease.